Growing Old in El Barrio
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Growing Old in El Barrio

Judith Noemi Freidenberg

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eBook - ePub

Growing Old in El Barrio

Judith Noemi Freidenberg

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About This Book

What is daily life like for an elderly person whose income barely covers basic needs? How is life constrained if that person is living within the same marginal enclave to which she first migrated decades ago? How does the implementation of national policies and programs affect the daily life of those growing old in Spanish Harlem?

In Growing Old in El Barrio, Judith Freidenberg addresses these questions by examining the life-course and daily experiences of the elderly residents of El Barrio. She interweaves the economy of immigrant neighborhoods with the personal experiences of Latinos aging in Harlem--such as Doña Emiliana, who lived in Spanish Harlem from her migration in 1948 to her death in 1995. Freidenberg further links policy issues to social issues critical to the daily lives of this population.

Combining extensive fieldwork interviews with historical and demographic population data, Growing Old in El Barrio paints an ethnographic picture of aging in Spanish Harlem and illustrates the emergence of New York as a city divided by ethnicity and class.

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Information

Publisher
NYU Press
Year
2000
ISBN
9780814728987

PART I
Growing Old

Aging is that stage of life in which we make an inventory of our past in order to define our present identity. What are the interrelationships among social space, social status, and social issues in daily life? This question will be addressed through three axes—aging as life-course transition, immigration as relocalization, and urban poverty as historical formation—from the perspectives of social and biographical history and political economy.
Part I focuses on the informants’ lives in Puerto Rico before migration, as well as the history and development of El Barrio before the arrival of the subjects of this study, using Emiliana’s experiences as a lens to compare and contrast those of others. Tracing the social history of the neighborhood situates the life histories and current concerns of the aging study population within the context of the larger society: Chapter 1 illustrates New York City’s ethnic and class structure through secondary sources on the social history of East Harlem. Historical information reveals how access (or lack of access) to housing and employment has affected successive waves of newcomers to East Harlem, resulting in the emergence of El Barrio as increasing numbers of displaced workers from Puerto Rico began to arrive and settle in what became a low-income enclave in New York.
Chapter 2 interweaves the historical with the biographical by exploring the life histories of the informants in Puerto Rico up until the time they migrated to the continental United States. As we will see, Puerto Rico and the continental United States were interconnected long before these people migrated.

ONE
From New Harlem to El Barrio de Nueva York

A Social History of East Harlem, 1658–1948

The history of Harlem contains a curious continuity. 
 It has always, for someone, meant Utopia. It has always, for someone, signified the end of a journey.
—Wakefield 1959, 35
The history of East Harlem is the history of migration to New York City, and it serves as a metaphor for the city’s ethnic and class residential arrangements. Immigrant communities imprinted the urban landscape with visible signs of their diverse national, regional, and social class origins. In the process of pursuing upward mobility, migrant populations reaffirmed ethnicity as a political ideology and as the discourse for expressing social class and racial differences. Different ethnic groups competed with one another for access to two major resources: housing and jobs.
Housing was an issue with both economic and political aspects. On the one hand, construction of new housing virtually stopped during major economic recessions. On the other hand, housing has always been an issue not only of class stratification but also of residential segregation—tenements were built to house the poor in cheap, quickly built structures. Ethnic groups could only expand into areas where they would encounter minimal social discrimination. Entry into a previously forbidden, off-limits space meant that newcomers had to be willing to fight for space, block by block.
Since the eighteenth century, a variety of social groups have danced their way in and out of Harlem in a process of discovering themselves and their place in society. The original inhabitants, the Weckquaesgek Indians, part of the Delaware nation, were skillful hunters, trappers, and fishermen. New Harlem was the first name given to the area by the Dutch, as they recorded the establishment of commercial relationships with Weckquaesgek in 1658 (Stewart 1972).
During the eighteenth century, East Harlem was a residential haven for both rich and poor. The rich, inhabitants of downtown Manhattan, either moved permanently or purchased summer homes in what they then called “the rich Happy Valley of Harlem” (Wakefield 1959, 35), then a suburb. The poor, crowded in shantytowns or tenements, also sensed opportunity in Harlem.
During the middle of the century, population pressure and incipient industrialization changed the social articulation of East Harlem to the rest of New York City. For New Yorkers, housing conditions mattered less than moving to a known social space. The result was that people settled among others they recognized socially and who could possibly help them find employment. This gave rise to circumscribed ethnic enclaves.
Toward the end of the century, populations moving to the area began to include migrants from Europe, recent arrivals facing housing scarcity in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The contrast between poverty niches and the oases of Dutch–style churches, hunting grounds, and country estates of the very rich, as well as restaurants, theaters, and the like (Stewart 1972), must have been as startling as crossing the border today from well-to-do Yorkville to poor East Harlem. But there was also an incipient lower middle class, mainly Irish and German, making its way into affordable row houses that were built quickly during the expansion of the housing construction and railroad industries (Stewart 1972). By the 1890s, when the population reached 241,000, East Harlem ranked second only to the Lower East Side among New York City’s most densely populated areas, making it a tenement district (Benson n.d.). Then, as now, housing was a major social issue. As early as 1885, a rent strike was organized by the Irish to protest high rents in tenements.
By the turn of the century, the area received its first African-Americans, both from Midtown Manhattan and from the American South (Ernst 1949). Residential segregation, however, kept this movement to a trickle until the railroad company bought out the residential area in order to build a larger station and relocated its inhabitants to row houses in what is now Central Harlem (Lenox Avenue and 138th Street). This population displacement attracted more African-Americans, and by 1910, Harlem came to be associated with this group (Wakefield 1959). Although many White real estate owners attempted to slow down the sudden influx of African-Americans, their efforts were unsuccessful.
While the African-Americans moved progressively west and the Irish and Germans moved east, alongside the East River, the area between Fifth Avenue and the East River was peopled by Eastern European Jews, Italians, and Irish. There was also a large Cuban colony whose members specialized in cigar-making (ColĂłn 1975), a profession also overrepresented among the first contingent of Puerto Rican migrants.
Eastern Europeans, mostly Russian Jews, settled in Harlem during the late nineteenth century in increasing numbers, following the ethnic and social class divide of the new land (Los Amigos del Museo del Barrio 1974; Gurock 1979). Better-off Jews lived on Lenox Avenue, where they owned real estate and large stores, while the poorer among them made their homes on Park Avenue, where they worked out of retail stores or peddled merchandise at the market under the elevated tracks. This Jewish Harlem (Gurock 1979) changed dramatically after the First World War, when many moved to better quarters—primarily to the Bronx—after the construction of the Lexington Avenue subway in 1919.
Eastern European Jews were replaced by incoming Italians. First housed at the Mount Morris Race Track stables, they moved to shanties at 106th Street and First Avenue and later, as the Irish had done, settled in shantytowns on the waterfront (Stewart 1972). The size of ethnic neighborhoods corresponded to their settlement history: thus, the Italians first nucleated around 106th Street whereas the Irish, having arrived earlier, extended from 74th to 104th Streets. By 1910, when the population of East Harlem grew to 341,000, Italian Harlem extended as far north as 113th Street (Los Amigos del Museo del Barrio 1974); by the 1920s, it had reached 116th Street. At its peak, a large part of Harlem—extending to about 104th Street to the south, Third Avenue to the west, 120th Street to the north, and east to the river—was, in fact, Italian (Orsi 1985, 17). By 1930, Harlem contained the largest Italian population in the United States.1
Although Eastern Europeans and Italians were the major immigrant groups to East Harlem, at the turn of the century, a skilled workforce representative of a leftist intelligentsia2 from Puerto Rico, Cuba, and other Latin American nations started arriving in increasing numbers.
During the First World War, when the stream of immigrants from Europe slowed and New York was expanding, primarily to the North: some Eastern European Jews and Italians who could afford it took the opportunity to move out of El Barrio to the other City boroughs and to Westchester in upstate New York. Thus, having choices regarding housing and work is only in part a function of ethnicity—if ethnicity is an equalizer, social class is a divider.
It was to this conflicted multiethnic urban landscape that Puerto Ricans started arriving after the First World War.3 Like prior groups of newcomers, arriving Puerto Ricans were the poorest population in the neighborhood. They faced social discrimination in housing that prevented them from sharing space with earlier and smaller groups of Latino arrivals, such as Cubans, Spaniards, and Dominicans, who had managed to settle in the southern part of East Harlem. Like all poor immigrants, they had to resign themselves to accepting the worst housing available—tenement houses. Very soon after their entry, finding no room in the east (the point of entry for most newcomers), Puerto Ricans occupied a niche centering around Third Avenue and 101st Street that was bounded by African-Americans to the north, Italians to the east, and by a high rent area to the south; thus, they could only expand west or share quarters (Handlin 1965; Wakefield 1959; Sánchez Korrol 1983; Chenault 1938). By the 1930s, 22 percent of the Puerto Ricans in New York lived in El Barrio, around two major settlement nodes at 101st Street and 116th Street.
A recession in 1922 conspired against the gains of the new immigrants. Overcrowding and unemployment were rampant.
They appeared to be more crowded than ever in the apartments. I have the impression that there was about a dozen people—men, women, and children—by room. (Iglesias 1984, 163)
Despite these harsh economic realities, Puerto Ricans kept coming to fulfill their dream of a better life.
In the Latin Quarter and in Harlem, in general, everyday seemed holidays. The streets were always full of people. Unemployment was rampant. Almost daily, a Puertorrican family was thrown out with furniture and all. 
 But our people did not seem to despair with economic depression. The fact that the crisis extended to all the U.S. made it easier to bear for those who had always lived on the fringe of misery. (Iglesias 1984, 207)
However, heavy immigration coupled with the housing shortage lit the fire that resulted in the so-called Harlem riots of 1926, in which all Spanish-speaking groups participated in a street protest against perceived housing discrimination from both the more established residents, who prevented the Spanish-speaking immigrants from expanding their neighborhoods, and landlords, who were negligent in observing maintenance housing codes.
Despite these invisible barriers, throughout the 1920s Puerto Ricans managed to superimpose themselves residentially on the Eastern European Jews and later on the Italians further south, but they were prevented from moving east by the claims to “ethnic turf” from established Italian and Russian Jewish settlements.
Since housing and employment were the most important needs of the newcomers, it is not surprising to find they were also pivotal in Barrio politics. Starting in 1927, Congressman Fiorello La Guardia4 understood the political importance of these issues at both the neighborhood and the national level, a concern later shared by Congressman Vito Marcantonio.5 At the local level, Marcantonio gave back to his native East Harlem by initiating slum clearance projects and creating an enclosed market (called La Marqueta by Puerto Ricans) to house street merchants under the elevated tracks on Park Avenue. Marcantonio’s staff was approached by residents to redress housing code violations at existing housing sites or to obtain space in public housing projects (Meyer 1989).6
Finding work was not easy either, and the Puerto Ricans fared no different than previous newcomers. The first contingent of migrants were literate, urban, semiskilled or skilled workers employed in manufacturing industries (Meyer 1992, 68). Others came with capital to start businesses such as boarding houses, butcher shops, botĂĄnicas, small pharmacies, barbershops, and, as the migration stream progressed, restaurants and nightclubs.
Negotiating the labor market was more difficult for those who came with few or no skills, but it also affected those who came with skills that did not easily transfer to the new setting. Many actually suffered downward mobility with the move. In fact,
El Barrio’s Puertorrican population experienced extremely little success in the labor market. They were—when able to find work at all—concentrated in low-paying manufacturing and service jobs. The Great Depression dealt them a devastating blow, because even those jobs were fiercely competed for. (Meyer 1992, 68)
The 1930s were particularly difficult for Harlem. Although the New York piers employed a sizable proportion of the men, the virtual halt of the construction industry that had attracted many newcomers to the area had major effects on housing and employment. In addition, the economic downturn was accompanied by increased migration from Puerto Rico and of African-Americans from the South (Stewart 1972). The entry of these two immigrant contingents accelerated the exodus of Italians and the consolidation of the Harlem landscape for the newer entrants; African-Americans tended to settle to the west, and the Spanish-speaking population to the east. By 1929, in the recollections of the Puerto Rican socialist Bernardo Vega, El Barrio was firmly established (see Iglesias 1984). The vibrant street life of its center—bounded by Madison Avenue, Lenox Avenue, 110th Street, and 116th Street—attracted many of the cigar-makers who lived further south. The face of Harlem changed: “Italian groceries became bodegas. Synagogues became Pentecostal churches with signs of services printed in Spanish” (Wakefield 1959, 43).
Iglesias (1984) recollects dismal stories of trying to find a job, but paints a picture of Harlem where the difficulties in finding work and housing were offset by the camaraderie of political work at the labor unions and participation in political, social, and hometown clubs (Freidenberg 1978).7 Iglesias sees East Harlem as a socialist center, where the status of Puerto Ricans—as migrants rather than immigrants—and the connections between the island and the mainland were discussed. Pedro Albizu Campus, elected president of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party in 1931, was one of the many socialist orators who addressed people at clubs and sometimes in the streets.
Worsening housing conditions in the 1930s gave Harlem the look it has carried into more recent times: vacant lots, tenements in disrepair, homelessness. Chenault (1938), compiling statistics from the New York Real Property Inventory of 1934 and the Census of 1930, estimated the prevalence of families living together or “doubling up” in East Harlem, at least temporarily, as twice that of Manhattan. However, Chenault traces this practice to times before the Depression.
Several years prior to the Depression, one large social a...

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